ABSTRACT
NARRATIVE, PERSONAL When one thinks of folk narratives, one thinks of stories with no known author that are told and
retold by many narrators in many places over many years. By these criteria, the story a college student might tell about the night he or she got into trouble for hosting a big, noisy party at home while his or her parents were away does not appear to be folklore at all: It had never been told until he or she had the experience and told someone else about it. Yet the “party bust” story contains a number of traditional elements. To begin with, there is a recognition that the experience is story-worthy-a recognition grounded not just in the unusualness of the experience itself but in the narrator’s familiarity with other people’s stories about their own unusual experiences. People tell stories that sound like the kinds of stories other people tell.
